Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Hamas was elected to govern Gaza. The Israelis have had Gaza under siege for years, preventing food etc. from coming in, and they're now bombing the hell out of it. I guess the US government moving to silence their voices would just be the icing on the cake - after all, the US is directly/indirectly financing the shelling of Gaza as well.

Of course, one thing that caused Hamas to grow was US and Israeli financing. The US and Israel were always more scared of secular, left-leaning pan-Arab movements like the PLO - during the Cold War, and after the Cold War as well. Hamas is very much a creation of Israeli financing. Now Israel and the US deem this organization they helped create terrorist. Just like Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the Taliban were seen as heroic, fighting against the secular Afghanis who were Russian-sympathetic in the 1970s and 1980s. Rambo even went to fight along with the heroic mujahideen, fighting against secular Afghanis and their Russian allies. When the US army occupied Saudi Arabia for a decade, they suddenly found Saudi patriots like Osama and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers didn't like their country occupied by a foreign military. So they went from freedom fighters to terrorists in a blink as well. Of course the US withdrew its military from Saudi Arabia within two years of 9/11 - the US is essentially just a bully, and will always run from those who will actually stand and fight against it (Vietnamese, Saudis etc.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8_8773TUmA [youtube.com]http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm [chomsky.info]http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200111--02.htm [chomsky.info]http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm [chomsky.info]http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200401--.htm [chomsky.info]"There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence."
It comes as no surprise that the propagandistic approach is adopted by governments generally, and by their instruments in totalitarian states. More interesting is the fact that the same is largely true of the media and scholarship in the Western industrial democracies, as has been documented in extensive detail.1 "We must recognize," Michael Stohl observes, "that by convention -- and it must be emphasized only by convention -- great power use and the threat of the use of force is normally described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism," though it commonly involves "the threat and often the use of violence for what would be described as terroristic purposes were it not great powers who were pursuing the very same tactic."2 Only one qualification must be added: the term "great powers" must be restricted to favored states; in the Western conventions under discussion, the Soviet Union is granted no such rhetorical license, and indeed can be charged and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence....
There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism, and on a scale that puts its rivals to shame...."

By that standard, there are a lot more twitter feeds the US government should be shutting down if it wants to shut down any feed that can remotely be construed as supporting "terrorism". That could begin with, if one accepts Chomsky's argument (and he is a professional linguist), some of the feeds put put by the US government. Where does it end? Freedom of speech is an ideal for a reason. How about a parallel twitter feed run by the US State Department that rebuts the Hamas feed point-by-point and tweet-by-tweet?

Their country's drug war is financed by American dollars and American mafia through American banks, aided by American prohibition and official corruption on both sides. America's war business is a big source of many problems everywhere south of the Rio Grande. Don't even try to deny it.

People might have flagged the post above as a troll, but there is a truth to that. There is a lot of blame in Mexico, with a music culture that for decades glamorized the drug cartels (and now the whole society is paying the price.) But there is no mistake that US drug consumption and the war on drugs are significant variables in this equation of death.

Both sides of the fence try to deny their own responsibility in this mess, and they are both equally stupid in doing so. Mexico has to come to grips with the cultural monster it created, and the US must come to grips with our failed war on drugs and our appetite for sugar candy and ruffies.

The Palestinian people are a problem for Egypt, Syria and others. That's because they are viewed as a problem by those regimes. Many of the Arab nations have either very low immigration quotas for Palestinians or allow no immigration at all by them. They commonly speak of the Palestinians as shiftless bums and born criminals, both as an attitude the majority of people seem to hold and sometimes in official government statements. These nations track violent activites by Hamas and others and keep lists of Palestinians who are dangerous and will never be allowed to stay in those Arab nations or even travel through those countries except with close supervision as part of support for their actions against Israel. How severe this is varies - with Egypt usually being better than, say, Syria about it, but it's a real part of the problem, with Arab governments wanting to endorse 'freedom fighters' whom they don't trust all that much otherwise.
This relationship between the Arab states and Hamas, etc. is often in some ways like the US propping up banana republics and turning a blind eye towards torture and lack of free elections in them, or the former Soviet Union supporting proto-communist movements in Africa or South America while all the time saying 'those people' will never really understand true communism. There's always elements of paternalism and racism driving such relationships, and so they end up contributing to the very problems they hope to solve. All this is not to deny Israel's responsibilities for such things as barbed wire fences and armed checkpoints, and other actions such as allowing illegal settlements or not prosecuting soldiers who aim those rubber 'mercy' bullets at the face at short range.

The Palestinian problem is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus [wikipedia.org]. Simply put Muslims evacuated war zones during the conflict between Jewish Palestinians reinforced with European migrants and the neighbouring Arabic countries. After the conflict was over. Muslim Palestinians who fled the war zone were not allowed to return.

So the Jewish Palestinians and the European immigrants found all these empty properties, homes, businesses, apartments and decided, well you just can't leave them empty and the original owners have all just 'er' disappeared, so let's create a law and give them to the immigrants, ohh look, complete with furnishings and appliances. Those disappeared people of course were stranded at the border and specifically banned from returning.

Hence the state created from theft, Israel and sixty years of conflict, with the Israelis continuing to try to steal the rest of Palestine. The mind boggling double speak of US politicians claiming Palestine is not real while Israel is, well, money can pay for anything to come out of a US politicians mouth.

Basically religious and ethnic apartheid to deny people the opportunity to recover their property and govern the whole of their country. Now the bullshit theft was accepted by the west not because of religion but solely because of the cold war. The pirate state of Israel was pro west and the surrounding Arabic states were pro-soviet union. The only reason the US continues to blindly support the Pirate state of Israel is because of an advanced Israeli Mossad intelligence operation that has corrupted US politics in their favour via campaign contributions and a political attack and propaganda campaign run out of AIPAC http://www.aipac.org/ [aipac.org]. Which of course leaves the US looking like idiots with Israel running a self funding intelligence operation that extracts billions out of the US treasury for absolutely nothing in return but getting sucked into fighting Israel's wars for it and spending billions even trillions more.

Now the Pirate State of Israel has lost support in most of the rest of the west because their intelligence campaign was largely targeted at the US and as such has pretty much collapsed elsewhere. The US was also the last country to have apartheid South Africa hanging around their neck largely again because of the flow of campaign dollars.